Old and New Masters eBook

As Sappho’s diamonds
with her dirty smock;
Or Sappho at her toilet’s
greasy task
With Sappho fragrant at an
evening mask;
So morning insects, that in
muck begun,
Shine, buzz, and fly-blow
in the evening sun.

His relations with his contemporaries were too often
begun in compliments only to end in abuse of this
kind. Even while he was on good terms with them,
he was frequently doing them ill turns. Thus,
he persuaded a publisher to get Dennis to write abusively
of Addison’s Cato in order that he might
have an excuse in his turn for writing abusively of
Dennis, apparently vindicating Addison but secretly
taking a revenge of his own. Addison was more
embarrassed than pleased by so savage a defence, and
hastened to assure Dennis that he had had nothing
to do with it. Addison also gave offence to Pope
by his too judicious praise of The Rape of the
Lock and the translation of the Iliad.
Thus began the maniacal suspicion of Addison, which
was expressed with the genius of venom in the Epistle
to Dr. Arbuthnot.

There was never a poet whose finest work needs such
a running commentary of discredit as Pope’s.
He may be said, indeed, to be the only great poet
in reading whom the commentary is as necessary as the
text. One can enjoy Shakespeare or Shelley without
a note: one is inclined even to resent the intrusion
of the commentator into the upper regions of poetry.
But Pope’s verse is a guide to his age and the
incidents of his waspish existence, lacking a key
to which one misses three-fourths of the entertainment.
The Danciad without footnotes is one of the
obscurest poems in existence: with footnotes it
becomes a perfect epic of literary entomology.
And it is the same with at least half of his work.
Thus, in the Imitations of Horace, a reference
to Russell tells us little till we read in a delightful
footnote:

There was a Lord Russell who, by living
too luxuriously, had quite spoiled his constitution.
He did not love sport, but used to go out with
his dogs every day only to hunt for an appetite.
If he felt anything of that, he would cry out,
“Oh, I have found it!” turn short
round and ride home again, though they were in the
midst of the finest chase. It was this lord
who, when he met a beggar, and was entreated
by him to give him something because he was almost
famished with hunger, called him a “happy
dog.”

There may have been a case for neglecting Pope before
Mr. Elwin and Mr. Courthope edited and annotated him—­though
he had been edited well before—­but their
monumental edition has made him of all English poets
one of the most incessantly entertaining.

Pope, however, is a charmer in himself. His venom
has graces. He is a stinging insect, but of how
brilliant a hue! There are few satires in literature
richer in the daintiness of malice than the Epistle
to Martha Blount and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.
The “characters” of women in the former
are among the most precious of those railleries of
sex in which mankind has always loved to indulge.
The summing-up of the perfect woman: